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Add a supported frontend override mechanism for agent templates that use e2e-chatbot-app-next #176

@mdbecker

Description

@mdbecker

Hi, one pain point with the agent templates is that small frontend customizations are hard to do cleanly because the chat UI lives in e2e-chatbot-app-next and gets fetched/built as part of app startup, instead of living directly in the derived project.

In practice, this means that simple changes like:

  • customizing the initial welcome message
  • changing small UI text/branding
  • adjusting a component or page in the shared chat UI

require downstream users to patch files in the checked-out frontend during start_app, which is brittle and hard to maintain.

A simple improvement would be to support a small, documented override mechanism. For example:

  • allow a repo-owned directory such as frontend_overrides/
  • apply those files onto the checked-out e2e-chatbot-app-next tree before build
  • fail loudly if an override target path no longer exists upstream

Why this would help:

  • keeps the shared frontend model intact
  • makes common customizations possible without forking/vendor-copying the whole frontend
  • gives downstream users a supported path instead of ad hoc patching in startup scripts
  • should help across multiple agent templates, not just one

This feels like a small change with a pretty big usability payoff for anyone trying to customize these templates beyond the defaults.

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